In general purpose electronic design, a microprocessor (MCU) is a popular choice for generating control signals to meet the timing requirements. However, there are some issues to be considered. For example, for low cost solutions, the MCU will be fully utilized for a number of tasks. The complexity of the software in the MCU will render low reliability of implementation. If the MCU is solely used for control signal generation, the cost of implementation is very high and the timer interrupt handling is required to be assigned with caution in order to achieve high reliability. High speed MCUs may be needed to achieve high speed operation, but they are relatively expensive.